


A Problem of Background

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 05:50:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11329821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: The Doctor needs Martha's advice about a new companion.





	A Problem of Background

**Author's Note:**

> Please be aware: the original character's background is _dark._ Note the warnings. Note also that she is very young.
> 
> This sprung out of a lot of inchoate thoughts about Doctor Who, and race, and companions we won't get to see on the screen any time soon even though I'd like to see some people from different eras. I'm not altogether sure about the result. For this story, even more than any other I've posted, I need people to write and tell me where and whether I've failed. Beta by Persiflage and Fourzoas, to whom I'm extremely grateful.

Martha Jones came home to find a strange man in her kitchen and the TARDIS completely blocking access to the fridge.

The second fact explained the first. She let out her breath slowly, trying to disperse the inevitable, someone-in-my-house, going-to-kill-me adrenaline jolt. Although if the TARDIS was here, she might end up running for her life anyway. She said, "Where's—"

The man turned around, hiding a bit of her toaster behind his back.

He looked young. Or rather, he should have looked young. His face was maybe twenty-six or so. The personality animating it—wasn't. The smile he gave her was too complicated, layered with guilt and sympathetic pain underneath recognition and sheer joy to see her, and his eyes _—weren't_ dark brown, which was disorienting, but they had that hint of endlessness that she remembered.

"Hello," the Doctor said. "Martha Jones."

_"Oh,"_ Martha said.

He blinked at her, then lifted his hand to his own cheek. "Oh, right, yes. New face, almost forgot. It's been quite a while, my time."

"I—" _Am never going to see him again, fought with but you're looking at him, you know that, don't be silly._ The irrational part of her cut back with, _no, I meant the_ real _Doctor,_ and Martha buried that thought as deeply as she could. It wasn't right and it wasn't fair, and it would hurt him. She shook her head. "Sorry. I realized it could happen, but it's still disorienting. To me." Asking how the Time Lords had coped with this sort of thing would be cruel at best. "Seriously, though, I'm glad to see you. Is something going to try to eat me in the next five minutes, or do you have time for tea? You do still _like_ tea . . ." Was she babbling? She was babbling. Martha closed her mouth.

"With milk and sugar and biscuits. I have a sweet tooth again!" He gave her a giddy grin, the sort it was almost impossible not to smile back at even if you were trying to be serious. "And, no. No invasion. There were some Yrtrathins at the petrol station on the corner, but they were just lost scientists. Looking into the possibility of Yrtra-forming Titan, sent an away team to see why this planet was so noisy, radio . . . ish . . . ly speaking . . ." The last incarnation had talked _even faster_ when he lost control of his sentences. This one waved his hands. And then noticed that he was still holding some essential component of her kitchen appliances, and put it in his pocket with the furtive air of a man who wanted everyone to know he absolutely wasn't doing anything furtive. "And they hit orbital detritus. One of these days you lot have to get up there with a giant broom. Well, I say broom. It's actually more like a net—anyway, I gave them a lift back to their survey ship, and I may now _possibly_ be banned from all Shell stations in Great Britain, but much as I hate to disappoint the manager, I don't actually see that affecting my lifestyle. No, I—" He turned away abruptly, to fiddle with one of her drawers, and the animation drained out of his voice. "Came to ask a favor."

And was feeling guilty about it, Martha realized. Or—no. Feeling guilty about _her,_ about all the tangled feelings and shared traumas between the two of them. And, knowing the Doctor, quite possibly beating himself up about all the wrong things, neglecting the ones that had actually been largely his fault. She made her voice deliberately softer. "What do you need?"

"It's not for me. It's for—I picked up a friend, recently, a new companion, and I wanted someone to have a look at her. Medically. Given her life, she hasn't had much opportunity—well, you'll see. If you're willing to do it. You don't have to."

All right, that was—strange. The Doctor was perfectly capable of handling medical issues himself, and he'd never thought to ask if Martha had a weak heart or some other invisible handicap before he invited her into his life, with all its running and monsters. Either he assumed that she was bright enough to bring it up on her own, or it honestly hadn't occurred to him that there might be a problem. There was more going on here, he'd spotted something that worried him, and he wanted her opinion because—because, why?

"All right," Martha said. "Where is she?"

He nodded toward the TARDIS.

~~~~~~~~

He'd changed the console room entirely, and that was another small shock. The TARDIS Martha remembered was all curves, a mysterious, organic-feeling place. This one was full of glass. If she'd been stepping on board for the first time, Martha thought she would have found it beautiful, even marvelous. As it was, it felt like a punch directly to the memory. What was this new, hard, cold place, and where had _her_ TARDIS gone?

The hum was the same, at least, and so was the fresh, slightly stormy smell of the air. She followed the Doctor down the usual tangle of corridors.

They came out in the wardrobe room. _Room,_ in Martha's estimation, had always been a bit of a misnomer; it was more like a clothing palace. A disorganized clothing palace. Victorian dresses hung side by side with sequined catsuits from who-knew-when, a twenty-foot scarf wound along the top of a rack like some sort of lazy jungle snake—if there was a rhyme or reason, Martha had never been able to work it out.

There was a rustle, and a little girl emerged from underneath one of the clothing racks.

She was perhaps ten, and black, with untrimmed, tight-curling hair. She was wearing a blue dress that involved more ruffles and lace than actual dress, a bright pink fur coat (which almost certainly wasn't actual fur) so long it dragged on the floor behind her, striped knee-high socks, and gold-sequined shoes that threw tiny rainbows in all directions. She had also found a Stetson that was several sizes too big for her, so that she had to push it back even to see. She glanced at Martha and then focused exclusively on the Doctor, a hard look that fell just short of being a glare. "You said," the child told the Doctor, "I could pick anything in the room. _Anything."_

What was the Doctor _thinking,_ having a child on board the TARDIS? The sort of things he stumbled into—the sort of things that were actively _hunting_ him, or would have been if there had been any way of telling where he'd turn up next—

Was he hoping Martha would discourage the girl? The Doctor had a bad habit of never actually saying the important things, but she hadn't thought he was that much of a coward.

"Don't be ridiculous," the Doctor said, and the girl's expression went even harder. She wasn't a particularly pretty child, and the pugnacious look emphasized it. "That hat's too big for you," he went on, and plucked it off of her. "It'll swallow your head." He conjured a child-sized Stetson from somewhere behind the nearest clothing rack and placed it neatly on top of her curls, putting the adult hat on his own head with his free hand. "Try this."

The girl went from resentful to delighted in a single astonished instant, and beamed. The Doctor beamed back—millennium-old power and little girl, in perfect and absolute harmony, at least for the moment. "Stetsons," the Doctor said, with the air of someone delivering the wisdom of the ages, "are cool."

The girl grinned. "Stetsons are cool," she echoed. She sounded American and extremely Southern, with a bit of a Jamaican lilt. She also sounded like she wasn't entirely sure what the Doctor had just said, but was willing to take it as revealed truth of the universe anyway.

He couldn't bring her along. He _couldn't._ Even without the danger, the Doctor was such a force—the girl idolized him already, Martha could tell, and she wasn't old enough to be able to stand up to him, and—and it just wouldn't _work._ "Doctor," she began.

"Right! Deborah, this is Doctor Martha Jones. Martha, Deborah."

Deborah looked at Martha. _"You_ ain't a doctor," she said, with absolute certainty.

"Yes, I am. Want me to prove it?" Of course, naming bones wouldn't impress someone who was too young to know that bones had names.

"No, you ain't. How'd—"

"Deborah," the Doctor said. It got instant, respectful silence. "'Isn't,'" the Doctor corrected. "Remember what I said about words. And yes, she is. Go with her to the sickbay, do what she says, and tell her what she wants to know. I'll be in the console room when you're done." He touched the brim of his hat and left.

Once again, that was—odd. Perhaps Martha just hadn't adjusted to the Doctor's new face—no, it was more than his face. His personality had altered, and she wasn't sure how much. He hadn't mentioned personality changes when he'd described regeneration to her . . . of course, he had a way of skimming over things, especially when talking about Time Lords, on the rare occasions when he actually did talk about them . . .

Deborah was studying her. "How'd you get to be a doctor?" she challenged.

"I studied. I went to school, I did an internship—that's where you learn by helping at a hospital—and I passed my exams."

Deborah followed her out into the hall willingly enough, which was a relief. Martha wasn't sure what she'd do if the kid really dug in her heels. "Yeah, but—who'd let you?"

"You're from before the nineteen fifties, aren't you?"

Deborah frowned. "What're those?"

Martha was somewhat floored. "They're a time. About sixty years ago—the Doctor did tell you that the TARDIS travels in time, didn't he?"

"'Course." Scorn. "Time And Relative De—Dimensions in Space."

"Right." The sickbay presented itself as the first room on the left, door open invitingly. Martha steered Deborah inside. "How long have you been traveling with the Doctor?"

"Just since yesterday." Deborah plunked herself down on one of the sickbay's narrow beds and looked at Martha expectantly, as if to say, _you think you're so hot? Do doctor stuff._

The sickbay was the same as Martha remembered. She found a stethoscope and an earlight in the first drawer she tried. "Do you know what year you were born in?"

"The year the storm split the big live oak in half. Makes me two years younger than Sam. Except you don't know who that is. I ain't— _izz unt_ —gonna see anyone from home. Maybe not ever."

She sounded pensive, but not overwhelmed by the thought. She had a distinctive way of pronouncing _gonna,_ swallowing the first vowel and making it very nearly _gwnna._ Martha couldn't place it; she thought it might be from somewhere in the Caribbean, but she was hardly a linguist.

"It's _I'm not,"_ Martha said, "or _I am not,_ actually. You know—" She was going to say, _you know the Doctor will take you anywhere you want to go,_ but she didn't know what had happened there. Deborah didn't have to be from the past, after all. Some destroyed colony planet—there was every possibility the child _couldn't_ go back.

She _needed_ more information. And her best source of it had taken himself off, Stetson and all. "Could you take off your hat, Deborah? Just for a moment. I'm going to use this to look in your ear. It'll probably tickle a little, but it won't hurt."

Deborah allowed this, with reluctance. She squinched up her face when Martha used the earlight, but didn't make a single sound of protest.

Her right ear was fine, if somewhat dirty, but there was a bumpy rash behind it. Bug bites, Martha thought; Deborah had head lice, or had done in the recent past. She checked the girl's hair, but saw no nits. "Does your head itch a lot?"

"Not now. I had a bath last night. _And_ I washed my hair."

"Good for y—" Martha pushed back Deborah's hair to look at her other ear, and stopped. "Oh, sweetie. How'd this happen?"

Quite a lot of her left ear was missing. Raggedly ripped away, from the look of it. The lobe was still there, and the ear canal didn't look damaged, but whatever it was had gone right through the cartilage.

"Master Richard cut it off," Deborah said casually.

Martha went still.

"First he put his pizzle in my mouth, but I ain't drinking _no_ piss, not ever, so I bit it. And then he grabbed me by the ear, and I think he wanted to slit my throat only that would get him in trouble with the old master, so he sawed my ear off instead. 'Cause it there, I guess. And I screamed and screamed, but I _never_ said I sorry, 'cause I ain't. And I ain't gonna lie, not for him, not for anyone." She sounded stubbornly proud of it. "They say," Deborah added happily, "that his thing swole up like a bullfrog and turned purple."

"Oh, I hope it did," Martha said fervently. "I really do. You did exactly right, Deborah, and never let anyone tell you differently." She took a deep breath, then let it out. "So—you grew up on a cotton plantation?"

She got another one of Deborah's _you are an idiot_ looks. "'Course not. Indigo."

At least it wasn't sugar cane. "And the Doctor rescued you."

Deborah nodded emphatically. "They had the rope around my neck and everything."

_"What?_ But you're _ten!"_

Deborah glared. "I'm _twelve,"_ she said, and then added reluctantly, "I think. Anyway, they thought I killed him. Everyone knew Master Richard had it in for me, and they all know I hated _him—_ and Cooper said I a sullen little witch, I always staring at people like I could murder them. And it's true, I might've killed Master Richard if I could've, but if _I_ went around killing people I'd put a rock on them and sink them in the mill pond, not leave them there with all their pieces took out. And I wouldn't've killed old George, who never did me a lick of harm, and I _would've_ got Cooper. Cooper was gonna do the hanging."

She lowered her voice and leaned forward. "Only then, there the Doctor. And the Doctor starts talking to him, all quiet-like, and Cooper starts _backing away._ Cooper never runs from nothing—they say he killed a man once, just for saying that whipping a lame horse ain't gonna do no good. And he big, he strong, but he backing up—you could tell just by looking at his face that he scared, and he barely believes it himself because he ain't _never_ scared—and then he puts his hands over his ears and starts screaming."

From the sound of her voice, Deborah had been more than a little fearful herself. Martha didn't blame her one bit. A quietly enraged Doctor, at close range—most nightmares were made of milder stuff. "Then," Deborah went on, "the Doctor came over, and he untied me, and he _nice."_ And that single fact had won him utter, infinite loyalty. "He asked me my name, and I said Debbie, only he started calling me Deborah like I a grown-up or a lady. He told me to stick with him until he found the thing doing the killing. He saved me from _it,_ too, and then I helped him right back. 'Cause I know the whole kitchen, and we had to kill it with salt, 'cause it didn't have no skin, just insides it stole from people. And salt made it—de—run out of water—"

"Dehydrate," Martha supplied. "It sounds terrifying."

Deborah nodded vigorously. "But I didn't scream."

_"I_ would've," Martha said, even though she wasn't sure of it. Screaming, after all, took oxygen that could be used for running. Lots of running. Lots of lovely, _fast_ running. "You're very brave. So, after that, the Doctor asked you if you wanted to come with him?"

"He said," Deborah said, in hushed tones, "that if I didn't want to come, he'd take me to _Canada."_

Freeing her in one stroke, Martha realized. And Deborah knew it too; she made the word sound somewhere between Disneyland and Heaven.

"I asked him if he could teach me what he'd done to Cooper. He looked at me all frozen, and I scared he gonna get angry, but he asked me what I'd use it for. And I said I'd go to all the overseers and scare 'em until they didn't dare pick up a whip, and then I'd go to all the masters like Master Richard, and then all the ladies who order folk whipped for things that ain't their fault, like the water not being hot enough when they the ones who said they wanted it fast."

"What did he say?" Martha asked, fascinated.

Deborah sighed. "He said he couldn't teach me exactly. He said if he didn't speak Chinese already, he could listen for just a little while and understand it even if he didn't have the TARDIS, because words go deep down inside him and he hears patterns that nobody else can. That a part of how he could do it, and he said the other part that he's seen things he cain't tell nobody, not and leave them all right afterward. But he said that doesn't mean I cain't learn how to use words—doesn't mean they ain't powerful for me, too. He said I a scrapper, anyone can tell it just by looking at me, but there two ways to fight evil. You can fight the folks who do it, or you can fight the ideas that _make_ it. He said they both important, but if I want to learn which to fight when, he'd take me along and show me what he can."

~~~~~~~~

The rest of the examination went smoothly, more or less. Deborah wanted an explanation of the stethoscope, and Martha let her listen through it. She pronounced the sounds, "just like what you hear underwater in the mill pond," but seemed somewhat impressed. She peppered Martha with a rapid-fire series of questions, many of them focused on who on Earth had let Martha become a doctor. She accepted the fact that she'd traveled more than two hundred years, and she could easily envision a world where some other group had become the slaves; the notion of _no slaves at all_ required a bit more mental wrestling. Having established that she'd arrived in an alien place indeed, Deborah set about determining what other common concepts were missing. Did they have horses? All right, but if the horses didn't pull carts anymore, what animal did? And if someone needed to fetch Martha for an urgent house call (her status having been tentatively accepted), what would they ride to do it?

Eventually, Martha told Deborah that it would be easier if they just went outside for a bit and she could see for herself. It was, she added, early June, so the pink fur coat wouldn't be needed—Deborah clutched it protectively—and if she left it in her room, nobody would take it away or even touch it. Deborah seemed intensely skeptical of this concept, but didn't comment.

When Martha got to the console room, the Doctor was tinkering, but with the air that meant _sitting still is my Kryptonite,_ not _there is a problem I have to fix._ "I," Martha said, "could just about slap you right now."

A quick, sad flicker of a smile. "Terrifying, isn't she."

Missing the point on purpose. Just like he used to do. "You let me walk into that blind. What if I'd tried to talk her into taking that dress off without realizing it was the first one she'd ever owned, or that she'd been—" She shouldn't assume that Deborah had told the Doctor about her molestation. "Whipped," Martha substituted. "The poor kid's been traumatized six ways from Sunday—"

She stopped. The Doctor was looking at her.

The Doctor never looked at her. Not really. Oh, he had pointed his eyes in her direction often enough, but sometimes you could practically feel his mental flinch, as if her mere presence stung. And then he'd start babbling about something, anything, to distract himself—lost moons, ice pyramids, little shops with funny little snow globes and had he ever told her he accidentally invented snow globes—and on, and on, a shifting, sparkling, kaleidoscopic curtain woven of pure language. Perhaps to hide her from him, perhaps to hide him from her, Martha had never been sure—but either way, a barrier.

Only right now, it was gone. There was a time when Martha would have given years off her life to get him to actually see her. She felt another pang; why couldn't this be _her_ Doctor, looking at her like that, ages ago?

Foolish thought. She was over him, she was done chasing heartbreak and trying to heal it by pouring Martha Jones into the emptiness. Do that too much and you'd run out of yourself.

"Sometimes," the Doctor said, "I miss things."

And Martha blinked, her train of thought derailed. "What? What kind of things?"

_"Things_ things. Staring-me-in-the-face things. Normal, everyday—" He waved his hands, a bit helplessly, but couldn't seem to avoid the next word. "Human things." He looked away. "I didn't realize how it would be," he said. "For you."

For a moment, Martha thought he meant the Year that Never Was. She drew breath to tell him that it _hadn't_ been his fault, they'd been on their third or fourth backup plan, and besides, he hadn't exactly spent the Year living on caviar himself—and then she realized. "Nineteen thirteen. The Farringham School for Boys."

He nodded. "You lot—you use each other for mirrors. All the time, and not just for the complicated stuff; for little things. Other human opinions are like reflections to you, and talking to someone who _has it wrong—_ must be like looking into a funhouse mirror when you can't get a glimpse of your own body. And don't have proprioception. And—actually, I don't imagine it's very much like that at all, but it's hard for me to say, even after nineteen thirteen. Living and working with people who saw you as so much less, so much smaller than Martha Jones—I understand enough to realize I _don't_ know the strain that put on you." The Doctor sat down on the jumpseat and gave her a brief smile, an expression like a man who has a large knife sticking out of him but wants his friends to know that it's not a problem at all, really. "I grew up knowing that there were spacefaring civilizations that worshipped individual Time Lords as gods. I grew up being told that sort of thing was unspeakably gauche, that it was _beneath_ us. There are beings living in some suns who are less alien to me than Deborah's childhood."

Martha forgot to breathe for an instant. The Doctor talking about his background, his _childhood,_ without his companion going on strike or a world-shattering crisis to make it happen—

He wasn't _okay,_ not by a long shot. It still hurt, and it always would. But at least the wound wasn't infected. "How long has it been?" she said quietly. "For you."

This time, the smile said, _yes, I know why you're asking._ "Two centuries."

She shook her head, not in disbelief but mild wonder. "You're over a thousand, now."

He grimaced. "Maybe. A bit. It's a gray area. I haven't decided if I'm eleven hundred and three and a large number of days, or nine hundred ten and a very, _very_ large number of days. Humans go all wobbly over four-digit numbers, and anyway, it's complicated."

_It's complicated,_ Martha thought, was very possibly Time Lord for _I have been lying about my age for much, much longer than I'm ever going to admit._ She set that question, intriguing as it was, aside, and sat down on the jump seat beside him. "You didn't need me for my medical opinion." He'd needed her because he came from the most privileged background in the entire universe, and god, that wasn't hyperbole _at all._ "You wanted—" She shook her head. "I'm honestly not sure how much I can tell you."

This Doctor waited for her to gather his thoughts. He _had_ changed.

"I've encountered prejudice. Long before I went to nineteen thirteen with you. There's outright discrimination, there's odd things like people telling me that Martha isn't a proper black name, and there's things you just have to be aware of—Tish and I had a very _tense_ conversation with our mother when we started straightening our hair—" The Doctor looked blank, and Martha realized that unless he'd had a black regeneration at some point, he would never, ever have encountered the entire fraught hair-politics snarl in its natural environment. "Never mind. It's complicated. Here's the thing, though: in my world, even racists get stroppy when people call them racist. Deborah comes from a place where those ideas are accepted by practically everyone—where respected academics argue about _why_ 'Negros' are inferior, not whether. And even after nineteen thirteen, I can't imagine what it's like to be born into that. Are you sure you want my advice?"

"Always."

Martha took a deep breath. "This scares me," she admitted. "Her, in your life. And it isn't just her age. I'm worried that she'll start worshipping you. And since she's never actually been exposed to the concept of human rights—"

"You're thinking," the Doctor said quietly, "that sometimes, I need stopping."

"I think she might not even tell you when something's wrong. With _her._ And I also think that humans aren't the only people who depend on feedback."

A quick smile. "True."

But he wasn't going to budge on taking her with him, was that it?

Fair enough. Martha had to admit, it would be a hell of a challenge finding a place where Deborah would actually fit. "I think," she said, "I'm not sure, but I _think_ the key to everything is just to show her. I assume you're not willing to take her back to nineteenth century Canada—"

"Perhaps someday. If she decides that's the right time and place and cause. I can't stop her from risking her life on the Underground Railroad—well, I could, but she wouldn't thank me. But at the moment, she doesn't have the tools she'd need, and I refuse to put her back like that. I'm not teaching her standard English to _erase_ that lovely Gullah accent; it's hers. I'm teaching her because in her native time, standard English is the language of those in authority. Always useful to know, words of power."

Martha nodded. "You'll have to teach her to read, too. That'll help. In a funny way, she's almost— _sheltered_ isn't the word for it, not with the sort of brutality she's faced, but she grew up in a bubble all the same. She needs to see people, all sorts of people, interacting; she needs to see that the rules she grew up with are local aberrations, not universal constants. Normally, I'd say she needs therapy for what she's been through, but—"

"As far as Deborah is concerned," the Doctor said, "she's not a victim. She's the moral victor of everything she's been through, and that's the only sort of victory that counts—the only victory she _allows_ to count, because it's the only sort she ever thought she'd get. Wouldn't hurt her to talk, but she'd spit on pity."

"I was going to say," Martha admitted, "who'd believe her?" Yes, he'd understand people who were highly allergic to pity, wouldn't he? "She needs—she needs some idea of what normal is. And—" Martha hesitated. "I'm seriously not sure if the TARDIS is the place for her to get that. But I know I can't talk you into sending her somewhere else. Hell, I don't even know if I'd be _right._ So just—try not to make it an endless string of crises. Take a rest once in a while. If you land somewhere and nothing goes unspeakably wrong, stick around and let her adjust. Give her some sense of stability, a feeling that things won't always blow up underneath her."

She wouldn't have even asked her Doctor for something like that. He wouldn't have been able to give it. But this incarnation—felt a little less like he was burning from the inside out.

Martha hoped it meant he'd found a little bit of peace, some balance, and not a new way of hiding from himself. But knowing the Doctor, it was probably a complicated amalgam of the two.

"Still," Martha concluded, "keep in mind, she's practically an alien to me, too."

The Doctor smiled slightly. "A bit less," he said, "now that she knows you're possible. Isn't that right, Deborah?"

Martha looked up.

Deborah had shed the coat, but she was still wearing that appalling confection of a dress and her sparkly shoes. And the Stetson, of course. "I didn't get half of what y'all talking about," Deborah admitted, and thumped down the glass stairs, looking at the Doctor. "You said," she accused, "that Doctor Jones _your_ doctor, and you'd trust him with the whole wide world. But Doctor Jones _her."_

"Yes, Deborah," the Doctor said softly. "She is."

"And—you ain't lying."

"No. I'm not."

Martha had never seen someone _visibly_ rewrite their entire mental universe before.

"Can we go out? I want to see a car. And London. And England. And—" And every single unfamiliar noun Martha had used in her conversation with Deborah, she realized, and oh sweet Jesus, if this was how the Doctor meant to deal with Deborah's hero worship—by getting her to imprint on Martha instead—she was going to throttle him. At the same time, she had to admire how smoothly he had done it. Never _telling_ Deborah that she needed a role model, just presenting Martha and letting the child work out that she had both expertise and respect.

"I think it's a good idea," Martha said. "Doctor?"

"Yes?"

"How long since you've been to the seaside?"


End file.
